Shelley: The Pursuit (13 page)

The question is, What do I love? it is almost unnecessary to answer. Do I love the person, the embodied identity, (if I may be allowed the expression)? No! I love what is superior, what is excellent, or what I conceive to be so, and wish, ardently wish to be convinced of the existence of a God that so superior a spirit should derive happiness from my exertions — for Love is Heaven, and Heaven is Love. Oh! that it were. You think so too, — yet you disbelieve the existence of an eternal omnipresent spirit. Am I not mad? alas I am, but I pour my ravings into the ear of a friend who will pardon them.
³⁷

One thinks of poor Timothy Shelley trying to cool his son with the idea of a prize-winning poem on the Parthenon. The invitation to Hogg for the Easter vacation was a wiser thought, but it came into effect far too late. When Shelley went back to Oxford for his second term in the last week of January 1811, he was going back to wage a secret war in a conspiracy of sacred friendship in which his main target was the theological authorities of the university. Fiction had become fact.

Shelley and Hogg were not now in the mood to be content with theoretical and private speculations, in politics, or poetry, or in theology. They embarked instead on a cleverly conceived and planned campaign to publicize their ideas within Oxford through the medium of Slatter and Munday’s bookshop. The first fruits of this had been a decoratively printed and assiduously circulated edition of the supposed
Posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson
, a collection of pastiches in the
Victor and Cazire
style, but with altered subject matter. Romantic and demoniac themes gave way to poems attacking warfare, monarchy, poverty and political oppression. One piece also gained a certain local notoriety for its apparent eroticism.
[3]
The whole, with its expensive binding and grotesque gothic type set, became something of a
succès de scandale
, and the subject of much university gossip in February.

But Shelley was out for bigger game, and he now turned his attention to the ‘cudgel against Christianity’, which Hogg had produced during the vacation. He edited and polished it, fitted it with introductory and concluding material, and sent it secretly to be printed in Sussex, under the mildly provocative title
The Necessity of Atheism
. Under Shelley’s hand the pamphlet became a neat and effective piece of theological polemic, about 1,000 words long, beginning with a tag from Bacon on the value of clarity of thought and logical demonstration. Its introduction set a tone of conscious innocence and integrity which was perfectly calculated to enrage a prejudiced reader. ‘As love of truth is the only motive which actuates the Author of this little tract, he earnestly entreats that those of his readers who may discover any deficiency in his reasonings, or may be in possession of proofs which his mind could never obtain, would offer them, together with their objections to the Public, as briefly, as methodically, as plainly as he has taken the liberty of doing. Thro’ deficiency of proof, An Atheist.’

The pamphlet then examines the proofs of a Deity available in three ways: through personal evidence of the senses, through reasoning as to the Prime Cause, and through the testimony of others. Each of these is in turn proved, syllogistically, to be inadequate. The pamphlet then demurely observes that ‘it is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief’. It concludes reassuringly: ‘It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such a proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. — Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.’

Hogg remarks that Shelley was particularly pleased with the mathematical effect of the ‘potent characters’ Q.E.D. at the end, like a kind of charm, especially designed for ‘their efficacy in rousing antagonists’.
³⁸
It has been noted that this is almost the first known open avowal of atheism in print in England.
³⁹

Copies of
The Necessity of Atheism
arrived from the Worthing printers on or just before St Valentine’s Day. Shelley and Hogg immediately began the process of distributing and mailing, taking great care to remain anonymous. A few days later the Oxford booksellers agreed to display copies in their bow window overlooking the High, apparently not having glanced beyond the title page. Seizing the opportunity, Shelley scattered copies throughout the shop, pricing them at sixpence. This was a dramatic chance for Shelley, but in the event also a fatal one. After only twenty minutes the Reverend Jocelyn Walker, a fellow of New College, walked in and read the little tract, immediately ordering all copies to be burnt at the back of the shop. Horrified, the booksellers complied. One copy was retained as evidence for the university authorities.

Munday, sensing trouble, wrote to Phillips the Worthing printer, and advised him to destroy all copies and type-sets immediately as it looked as if a prosecution for Blasphemous Libel was afoot.
⁴⁰

On 17 February, Shelley wrote to his father from Oxford with cheery reassurance:

It is needless to observe that in the Schools Colleges &c which are all on the principle of Inquisisatorial [sic] Orthodoxy with respect to matters of belief I shall perfectly coincide with the opinions of the learned doctors, although by the very rules of reasoning which their
own systems
of logic teach me I could refute their errors. — I shall not therefore publically come under the act ‘de heretico comburendo’.
⁴¹

Yet here arises one of Shelley’s extremely characteristic pieces of calculating duplicity. For the very same day, 17 February, he wrote to his friend Edward Graham, who was acting as a kind of literary agent for him in London with Stockdale, that he had completed sending copies of
The Necessity of Atheism
to all the bishops, and heads of colleges, and that they must now consider plans for advertising and publishing the tract in London.
⁴²
By this date also, the pamphlet had been advertised in the
Oxford University and City Herald
, and exposed for sale in Slatter and Munday’s window.
⁴³
Shelley was coolly playing his own double game. ‘I intended to have come to London on Saturday, but if I left Oxford so abruptly I shd. be suspected as the Author of the tract,’ he apprised Graham.

It is doubtful if the mere twenty minutes of sale at Munday’s would itself have led to Shelley’s arraignment and expulsion. There were, after all, alternative penalties: for example, he could have been rusticated for a term. It was Shelley’s deliberately inflammatory tactic of mailing the pamphlet to all the bishops and all the heads of colleges which put the matter into a wider and more dangerous arena. This he perhaps intended; but he could not have foreseen the party-political antagonisms which he inflamed.

This was further exacerbated on 9 March when he advertised
A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things
[4]
to be sold price two shillings, ‘by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford’. This was the openly political side of Shelley’s campaign with Hogg against the authorities, and the declared intention of the sale of the poem was that of ‘assisting to maintain in Prison Mr Peter Finnerty, imprisoned for libel’.
⁴⁴
On 7 February Peter Finnerty the Irish journalist had finally been sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for his protests against the government’s disastrous military policies. Finnerty had written for the Whig
Morning Chronicle
and the Walcheren fiasco was the result of Tory policy. Finnerty’s case was taken up at once in London by the left ginger group of the new Whigs, notably Sir Francis Burdett, and by the
Examiner
group of liberals who always fought with considerable daring on free
speech issues. Meetings were held at the traditional centre of reform politics, The Crown and Anchor, and Shelley read the accounts avidly. In Oxford, the
Herald
opened a public subscription for Finnerty, and on 2 March four courageous names had appeared with one-guinea donations. One of these was ‘Mr P.B. Shelley’.
⁴⁵
On the same day, Shelley wrote a private letter to Leigh Hunt, the 27-year-old editor of the
Examiner
. His ostensible motive was to congratulate Hunt on his recent acquittal in a libel action.
[5]
Shelley introduced himself as follows: ‘My father is in Parliament, and on attaining 21 I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat.’ This apparently indicated that he was considering a political career within the auspices of the left wing of the Whigs.

But Shelley’s real reason for writing was that he had concocted in discussions with Hogg a plan for uniting the many dislocated reform groups which had remained splintered and ineffective virtually since the nineties, when Pitt took the nation into war with the French, calling for national unity and suppression of agitators and radical groups. Shelley’s plan was that a meeting should be called of all reform elements, and from this there should be constructed a ‘form of methodical society which should be organized so as to resist the coalition of the enemies of liberty which at present renders any expression of opinions on matters of policy dangerous to individuals’.
⁴⁶
It has been pointed out that this suggestion preceded the formation of just such a ‘methodical organization’ in the Hampden Clubs of Major Cartwright which brought together both solid parliamentary Whigs and popular reformers, in the final months of the Napoleonic War.
⁴⁷
But Shelley’s suggestion for an extra-parliamentary political reform organization went further than this. As his letter to Hunt shows, he had a particular historical model in mind:

It has been for want of societies of this nature that corruption has attained the height at which we now behold it, nor can any of us bear in mind the very great influence, which some years since was gained by
Illuminism
, without considering that a society of equal extent might establish
rational liberty
on as firm a basis as that which would have supported the visionary schemes of a completely-equalized community.
⁴⁸

The comparison with Illuminism must have shaken Hunt when he read it. The Illuminists were the secret international Jacobin society, dedicated to worldwide revolutionary conspiracy, founded by Dr Adam Weishaupt, in Ingolstadt in May 1776. Their doctrine was one of militant egalitarianism, the destruction of private property, religion and ‘superstitious’ social forms such as marriage.
Their methods were essentially conspiratorial, based on the Masonic type of secret lodges, and with a tradition of antinomian underground movement dating back to a medieval Spanish sect of the same name. In England their work was known exclusively through the rabid witch-hunting four-volume treatise on their infamies by the French emigré the Abbé Augustin Barruel:
Histoire du Jacobinisme
(1797). This book had come into Shelley’s hands, possibly through Hogg, in his first term at Oxford; and it was the Illuminists’ watchword that he had quoted in his letters of the Christmas vacation. There was no reply to Shelley’s letter from Hunt, but the idea of that visionary ‘completely-equalized community’ as the basis for movements of political liberty remained an active ideal for Shelley for the next two years; and in modified form throughout his life.
[6]

By this time in mid-March of 1811, Shelley’s views and publications had become widely known among the small circle of Fellows and undergraduates, and the notoriety that he had deliberately set out to court had been at least partially achieved. If he had not yet exactly stormed the stronghold, he had succeeded in arousing its distasteful interest.

Charles Kilpatrick Sharpe, an MA of Christ Church College, wrote to his patron Lord Bury, with what he took to be an amusing piece of undergraduate scandal:

Talking of books, we have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here, before whom our former luminaries must hide their undiminished heads — a Mr Shelley, of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hours sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicolson. He hath published what he terms [her] Posthumous Poems, printed for the benefit of Mr Peter Finnerty, which, I am grieved to say, though stuffed full of treason, is extremely dull; but the author is a great genius, and if he be not clapped up in Bedlam or hanged, will certainly prove one of the sweetest swans on the tuneful margin of the Cherwell

Sharpe, who was preparing for his later career as an anonymous Tory writer on the authoritarian
Quarterly Review
, completed his survey with genial disapproval.

Our Apollo next came out with a prose pamphlet in praise of Atheism, which I have not as yet seen, and there appeared a monstrous Romance in one volume, called St. Irvyne or The Rosicrucian. . . . All the heroes are confirmed robbers and causeless murderers, while the heroines glide
en chemise
through
the streets of Geneva, tap at the palazzo doors of their sweethearts, and on being denied admittance leave no card, but run home to their warm beds, and kill themselves.
⁴⁹